Otherwise I tend to agree that we should just declare \ paths to be
known not to work, until somebody does a patch.
I've come to believe we should not even accept a patch. Any such
support would tend to be pervasive, destabilizing, and require further
work in who-knows-how-many-places. And furthermore, \ paths are not
going to work in texinfo.tex, ever.
Texinfo has existed for some 25 years without supporting \ paths, so I
simply cannot believe we need to start now.
k